April 30, 2013

"D.C.’s Race Disparity in Marijuana Charges Is Getting Worse"

The title of this post is the headline of this notable recent commentary by Rend Smith appearing in Washington's City Paper. Here are excerpts (with links from the original):

[D]ozens of marijuana activists converged on the National Mall
to celebrate 4/20 and push for the drug's legalization. If photos and
videos are any indication, most of the attendees were white. As a black
man, I find their efforts laudable and hearteningly altruistic. D.C.'s
campaign against marijuana is racist. If it wasn't, District marijuana
enforcement would look a lot less abominable.

In 2010, I wrote about how Jon Gettman,
a public policy professor at Shenandoah University, pored through the
city's 2007 marijuana arrest records to discover the District had
arrested more pot offenders per capita than any other jurisdiction in
the country. Gettman also found that the overwhelming majority of pot
miscreants the city went after that year — 91 percent — was black.

... In 2007, a black person was eight
times more likely to be arrested for a District marijuana offense than a
white person, even though researchers have exposed what any college pot
dealer can tell you from the comfort of his Barcalounger: Members of
both racial groups consume cannabis at nearly equal rates.

D.C.'s dope divide is just as striking when you zoom out. According
to arrest numbers obtained from the Metropolitan Police Department and
crunched by a statistician, between 2005 and 2011, D.C. cops filed
30,126 marijuana offense charges. A staggering number of those — 27,560,
or 91 percent — were filed against African-Americans. Only 2,097 were
filed against whites.

Blame-the-victim folklore contends that pot-arrest asymmetries, which
show up in various cities around the country, are about blacks smoking
outside and getting their pot on street corners. Recent studies contradict that. And if D.C.'s shameful pot disparity was about anything but racial bias, we'd see it narrowing.

Instead, though the number of black and white pot charges filed
fluctuated from year to year, reefer charges filed against blacks rose 6
percent and declined 10 percent for whites between 2005 and 2011.

Over the last decade, the federal
city's black population has wavered as its white population shot up. If
municipal pot arrests were impartial, that should have equaled more
white potheads learning what the inside of a squad car looked like as
arrests of black potheads became scarcer. Latinos, moving into the city
in steady if not overwhelming numbers, for instance, saw their pot
arrests rise 40 percent between 2005 and 2011, from 93 pot charges to
153.

Also, at a time when weed has become another chic amenity, there's a
good chance that the city's affluent whites have most of D.C.'s stash.
Last year, Washingtonian ran a gleeful article about
the massive amount of weed rambling through D.C.'s elite neighborhoods
courtesy of drug-dealing stroller moms and tony pot-delivery services....

The only politician explicitly working to address the dope divide is longshot at-large D.C. Council candidate Paul Zukerberg, who's made marijuana decriminalization part of his platform.
He attributes the disparity to cops using stop-and-frisk powers on
young black males. "In D.C., we’re giving young people twice as many
marijuana arrests as high school diplomas," he writes on his website.

Other D.C. politicians I contacted, like Mayor Vince Gray, wouldn't comment on the matter or didn't return messages. But when I mentioned the dope divide to Police Chief Cathy Lanier (who told the Washington Post she’d
tried weed as teen) during an email exchange last year, the top cop
seemed concerned. “Broad statement,” she wrote. “Mixed feelings on
enforcement here...” When I tried to get Lanier to say more, she referred me to her
spokesperson, who told me that MPD doesn't insert itself into politics.

Comments

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/40853/how-dcs-majority-black-police-force-helps-the-city/ is a piece by the same guy noting that the DC police force is majority black. While the old piece complains about an alleged predominance of whites high in the departmental chain of command, the police force is ultimately accountable to politicians who are in turn accountable to a majority-black electorate. According to the new piece, apparently none of the city's many prominent black politicians share Mr. Zukerberg's enthusiasm for reform. So what's going on in terms of the underlying politics here? (Note by contrast that in NYC politics attacks on the NYPD's vigorous stop-and-frisk campaigns and the allegedly disparate racial impact of the oft-ensuring petty marijuana charges are quite widespread among those jockeying to be the next mayor.)

Posted by: JWB | May 1, 2013 11:31:46 AM

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